All religions have it's own myths, own stories, own set of values. And these are/were good stories, I mean, even though they are not true, they are certainly interesting. You won't feel bored by it.
Harry Potter has the same effect on people, like, why should I take Harry Potter seriously, why do I care what happens after Dumbledore dances with Snape (won't give actual spoilers :')
I mean, it doesn't make sense to me. Why do I care so much about a soap opera that I am watching. Harry Potter is the product of just one brilliant woman's imagination. It has no real value on my life. I have no real motivation to read that other than the fact that I like it and I want to know. Harry Potter is somewhat irrelevant to my life, than why does it or any other good story capture our imagination?
Why do I care what the next season of House M.D. entails? Why? What should I care if he dies or lives? Why :')?
We've been telling stories for as long as we've been talking. They're knowledge, history, dream and memory.
stories are us, they're how we teach our children what to believe, how to live, who to trust. And then we fucked it with the printing press and advertising and cinema and consumerist attachment lol
Adding to consumerist attachment, these days stories are also used as an escapism tool. From a fatalistic point of view, you can lose yourself in a movie for a little while, binge a series, read a book and be somewhere totally different than where you are. You can believe that for a while if the story is good enough.
There’s also the appeal of “living vicariously” through a story. I tend to enjoy stories with more focus on characters and their development, and inevitably get invested in them from the simple connection of being human. I can see the ugly side of myself within flawed characters, I can learn lessons from the mistakes of others, I can take comfort in certain emotional developments and despair in others. Stories provide a safe place to explore different points of view, ideas, emotions, and events, especially ones people don’t talk about day to day or ones that are darker than your every day life.
Sharing, and believing in, fictions is how distilled units of information are efficiently passed down generations and is one of the bedrocks of our development as a species. This is what allows us to have laws and corporations and agreeing to drive on particular side of the road.
Yuval Noah Harari covers this more eloquently in his book Sapiens. You would definitely dig the relevant chapters.
Yuval Noah Harari covers this more eloquently in his book Sapiens.
time to read it again I think. It is a wonderful book, but I dont remember reading about this particular topic in enough detail. Thank you for your comment
You are more than welcome! The chapter is called Unification of Humankind for anyone else interested, here is a little excerpt:
“Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.”
time to read it again I think. It is a wonderful book, but I dont remember reading about this particular topic in enough detail. Thank you for your comment
haha, thank you again!
Beautiful explanation. I just learned something else. Our brain can't learn and listen to everything, so if you listen to stories from the point of view of a certain ideology or person, the more you feel justified to defend that person as long as that person is within rational limits of actions.
You get what I am trying to say, I think this is a factor in why we are so polarized today. We are empathizing with and listening to people who have a particular bent of ideology more and more and since our brains don't really like contradictions, the more we listen to one kind of stories, we can't listen to the other kind of stories, what do you think?
I agree with you completely here. Although I too am not sure about contradictions. I think I was going for the word coherence here.
Religion is just contradictions on steroids…
This is so true. I mean, for something which is holy, our fingerprints are all over it and it shows.
We tell ourselves stories about our own actions, choices and beliefs (internally). We desperately want to believe that our own behavior is consistent and coherent. Fitting our behavior into a narrative helps us maintain this illusion ("I did Y thing because X thing happened to me, and then Z thing happened because I did Y").
We tend to assume that cause-and-effect relationships are true and real, that we perceive causes and effects correctly, that we associate causes with effects accurately, and that we perceive all causes and effects that are relevant. These assumptions give us a narrative structure through which we make sense of our own behavior... though they are about as reliable as any of our other assumptions.
Anyway, the upshot is that framing the actions, choices and beliefs of others into a story helps us to understand and empathize with them (or condemn and villify them). The stories are a construct formed mostly from confirmation bias, but we struggle to make sense of reality without them.
The world is complicated and difficult to navigate. Stories usually give you a simplified world where it's easier to understand and relate to. Just think of most religious stories and myths, they exist to explain something unexplainable (how the world was created) or how to behave in a society (cautionary tales and parabolas)
Harry Potter is the product of just one
brilliantbarely literate woman’s imagination.she's good though! I don't know about her education but after all this, I am sure it doesn't matter. Why do you say barely literate, I don't think I found anything wrong with the books
Her writing is awful, wooden, and stilted. Her dialogue is painful. Her characters are boring at best and outright racist stereotypes at worst.
She either doesn’t know how to write skillfully or chooses not to. I figured the former was more charitable.
I would say the simple answer is in why we still teach "story problems" in math.
The "story" of the math problem gives us a way to contextualize knowledge in how it can be applied to real life.
Most stories impart social knowledge, not math knowledge. Stories are primarily about relationships and how to (or how not to) navigate them.
